James Symonds (University of Oulu, Finland)
For more than 150 years archaeology has had a clear purpose, to sketch out the topography of the past from the pinnacle of the present. Like the traveller’s gaze in Shelley’s Ozymandius, archaeologists have lingered over fragments from ancient times, evoking feelings of wonder, irony, and loss. Archaeological research has helped to fill the perceived ‘black hole’ that exists between the past and the present (Rathje, La Motta, Longacre 2001) and has served nationalism and modernity by informing individual and collective identities. But what happens when we choose to remove this sense of distance and nostalgia for the past from our work and acknowledge the ‘loss of antiquity’ (Hicks 2003)? If we eschew the idea that archaeology exists to connect the present to distant pasts and re-position our discipline to focus upon ‘the interaction between material culture and human behaviour, regardless of time of space’ (Rathje 1979, 2) then we free ourselves from temporal parameters and any material may be subject to archaeological inquiry (Buchli & Lucas 2001, 3-18).
As Hedley Swain pointed out in his keynote address to the 2009 CHAT conference in Oxford, the craft of archaeology employs a standard range of techniques. Archaeologists are very good at observing physical relationships and placing them in a chronological sequence. We also routinely identify patterns of human action through their material residues, and are adept at describing objects in accurate and close detail to determine their composition and possible uses. If we turn our to attention to the contemporary world we are able to use these techniques to observe physical relationships and detect patterns of human behaviour in material things.

photo of over-painted road markings

cigarrette ends outside the IUAV (School of Architecture) Venice.
We can also study objects in great detail to determine their composition and probable use.

photo of stapler
Without the idea of time-depth, however, and the notion of distance and otherness that this brings, our work may seem to lack significance. Compare these two images. First, Buzz Aldrin’s photograph of his boot print, taken on the lunar surface in 1969

image source: NASA
and second a photograph of a child’s boot print in the snow in 2009.

Which is the most significant? Both images record an ephemeral human action, an impression left in a fleeting moment (although on the stillness of the lunar surface Aldrin’s boot print may admittedly be preserved for millennia). The photograph of Aldrin’s boot print has gained iconic status as it marks a defining moment in global history – the first manned moon landing. The child’s boot print is ostensibly far less significant, but it is nevertheless important to me, as it records a passing moment in my son’s childhood, part of the everyday, and something that would have gone unrecorded prior to the purchase of a family digital camera. So who’s to say that it is not also significant at a personal level, and perhaps even to future scholars wishing to study childhood and family life in the early 21st century?
If these two images were to be shown to a public audience there are at least two reasons why the photograph of my son’s boot print would probably not be recognised as something of widespread social or cultural significance. First, the photograph seems all too familiar. The rise of photographic and digital media in the twentieth century has meant that our individual and public lives are documented in immense and obsessive detail; we are showered with images of the everyday, and images such as this are commonplace. Secondly, and more fundamentally, the Western conception of linear time, which divides the temporal spaces of past and future with a third – the present – places this image in the knowable present, and consigns it to the category of personal trivia. Aldrin’s photograph on the other hand may be firmly located in the past-that-is-now-gone, and would probably be recognised as evidence of an heroic achievement that is remembered in an imagined shared history.
There is of course a problem here, as the present does not exist, or is at best an infinitesimal point in time. If I raise my hand into the air the movement may be understood as a temporal sequence in which the first movements have passed before my hand is fully upright, and yet I perceive the act of raising my hand into the air as a singular movement. Philosophers refer to this telescoping of events into one present moment as the ‘specious moment’ (Becker [1932] 1965, 119-120). The specious moment can be extended as far as we choose, so we may talk about ‘this year’, or ‘this decade’. It can also serve to demarcate that which is not now for any number of individual or collective reasons. Hence, the death in the UK in 2009 of the last surviving serviceman from World War I (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8168691.stm) was widely perceived as the moment at which that conflict, which ended more than 90 years ago, became an historical event as it is now beyond the reach of human memory and contemporary personal experience.
Recent archaeological theory has attempted to overcome the arbitrary division of past and present by noting that the past ‘percolates’ (Witmore, 2004) or to put it another way, that ‘There is no archaeology of the twenty-first century, but only an archaeology of the twenty-first and all its pasts, mixed and entangled’ (González-Ruibal, 2008). This stance re-positions archaeology to look around, in a panoptic way, rather than simply gazing backwards, but the question of how much actual value there is in studying modern materials remains.
An earlier generation of anthropologically-trained archaeologists analysed modern material culture in a variety of ways; William Rathje’s garbology attempted to provide a socially-embedded critique of consumer society (Rathje, 1979) while others used ethno-archaeology to create models that could help to explain culture change in the more distant past (Gould and Schiffer, 1981). The flourish of contemporary archaeologies that have emerged in the last 10 years (Graves -Brown 2000; Buchli and Lucas 2001; Piccini and Holtorf 2009) have taken a different tack, and are often predicated on the belief that the study of contemporary materialities has ‘social relevance and meaning in ways that may not exist for archaeologies of earlier time periods’ (Harrison & Schofield, 2009, 198). This is a bold and potentially liberating stance, and if we accept Paul Connerton’s argument that forgetting is a characteristic of modernity (Connerton, 2009) then our efforts to document contemporary life may be making a valuable contribution to contemporary future society.
What troubles me is that the incredulity that often greets media reports about contemporary archaeology projects (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/outdoors/article6815635.ece) suggests that we are not doing enough to explain the relevance and potential significance of contemporary archaeology to non-specialist audiences. Grahame Clark, writing in 1939, understood that archaeologists were accountable to society as a whole when he posed the rhetorical question ‘Does prehistory really mean enough to us today to support such large claims on social resources?’ (Clark [1939]1968, 251). As the new sub-field of contemporary archaeology emerges we would be wise to ask a similar question.
My point is a simple one: through a growing body of published academic work, and the success of the CHAT conferences and other symposia, we have convinced ourselves, and perhaps some academics in related fields, that it is possible to create contemporary archaeologies. We have been less successful at convincing sceptical public audiences that this type of archaeology is meaningful, and worthy of their support. To do so we need to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about modern life head on, and through community engagement, and a focus on high-profile contemporary concerns such as the nature of conflict, consumerism, poverty, and environmental sustainability, encourage people that our studies will enable them to think in different ways about the contemporary and future world.
References
Becker, C.B. [1932] 1965. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Buchli, V., G. Lucas 2001. ‘The absent present: archaeologies of the contemporary past.’ In Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, edited by V. Buchli and G. Lucas, London and New York: Routledge, 21-25.
Clark, G. [1939] 1968. Archaeology and Society. London: Methuen.
Connerton, P. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gould,R.A., M.B. Schiffer (eds) 1981. Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us. New York: Academic Press.
Graves-Brown, P. (ed) 2000. Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Harrison, R., J.Schofield 2009. ‘Archaeo-Ethnography, Auto-Archaeology: Introducing Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past.’ Archaeologies, 5 (2), 185-209.
Hicks, D. 2003. ‘Archaeology unfolding: diversity and the loss of isolation.’ Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 22 (3), 15-29.
Holtorf, C., A.Piccini (eds) 2009. Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
González-Ruibal, A. 2008. ‘Time to Destroy: An Archaeology of Supermodernity.’ Current Anthropology, 49 (2), 247-279.
Rathje, W.L. 1979. ‘Modern Material Culture Studies.’ In Michael B. Schiffer (ed.) Advances in Archaeological Method &Theory, 2, New York: Academic Press, 1-27.
Rathje, W. L., V. LaMotta, W.A. Longacre, 2001. ‘Into the Black Hole: Archaeology and beyond.’ In Archaeology: The Widening Debate, edited by. B Cunliffe, W. Davies, and C. Renfrew. London: British Academy, 497–539.
Witmore, C. 2004. ‘Vision, media, noise and the percolation of time: symmetrical approaches to the mediation of the material world.’ Journal of Material Culture, 11(3): 267-92.
Websites referenced
WWI veteran Patch dies aged 111
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8168691.stm (accessed13/01/2010, 14.01)
Seventies campsite in Forest of Dean excavated by Oxford archaeologist
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/outdoors/article6815635.ece (accessed 13/01/2010, 14.50)